Tag: physical therapy

It was actually a little anticlimactic, to be honest. Officially he was supposed to wear it for another week, but we asked for our last adjustment appointment to be our “graduation” appointment so that we wouldn’t have to drive 45 minutes each way again just to get pictures taken. So they adjusted the band, gave us a little certificate, and sent us on our merry way. We were thrilled to not have to go back and they were thrilled to never see my face again.

But then, just under a week later, Jacob started getting red spots that took about five hours to go away, which meant we’d outgrown the helmet and were done early.

Which we celebrated by…questioning our decision to remove the helmet.

Well, that’s how I celebrated. My husband had zero qualms about being done early because either dad guilt isn’t a thing or it’s much milder than mom guilt.

As adamantly opposed as I was to the idea of a second helmet (and yes, I still think that’s a money grab in many cases), Jacob DOES still have a flat spot. So am I being selfish for wanting to be done? But on the flip side, it’s a DIFFERENT flat spot than the one the helmet was correcting, so did I cause this new one by helmeting him in the first place?

The reality is that no one but me (and I suppose other moms who have dealt with flat heads and are now hyper alert to them) is ever going to notice that his head is anything but perfect. While I now have flat-head-dar and look at the shape of everyone’s heads (it’s terrible. I look at my students and am like, “wow, you should have had a helmet!”), there are people who I looked at every day for years without ever thinking “Wow, your head looks like the east building of the National Gallery!”

Pre-helmet, Jacob’s misshapen head was noticeable. It isn’t anymore unless you’re really TRYING to find imperfections (and looking at him directly top down. He’s got a tall daddy, so I’m thinking that won’t be the case for most people for the majority of his life). By all accounts, the helmet was very successful in reshaping Jacob’s head. And what it didn’t fix will most likely round out by his second birthday on its own.

So I guess what it really boils down to how to live with the mom guilt.

Pre-baby, it was just guilt. Which I suppose comes with the territory. I am Jewish after all, and if our people are known for anything, it’s guilt. You’re welcome. (See what I did there? I learned at the knees of the masters!)

I automatically assume everything is my fault no matter what. I should have tried harder. Been better. Gotten more people out. Yes, I was born decades after the Holocaust, but damnit, I should have done more!

So now that the helmet is done and his head isn’t a miraculously perfect round orb, I need to find a way to let it go. I’m trying to tell myself that that’s the lesson I’m supposed to learn here. A couple of people said to me, after I went public about the situation with Jacob’s head and neck, that we get the baby we NEED, not necessarily the baby we WANT. On the surface, that sounds terrible, because of course I WANT Jacob! He’s the absolute best part of my life.

But I get where those people were going because I think I needed to learn that I can’t control everything. And if I can’t control everything, then not everything can be my fault. Some things just happen and I need to learn to roll with it.

That’s really a struggle for me and was part of why the inability to exclusively breastfeed Jacob was so devastating as well. I had found something that I couldn’t control. My mother called me arrogant when I expressed that to her, and she’s not wrong. But up until motherhood, I lived a life where I was largely able to say I was going to do something and then find a way to make it happen, come hell or high water. Failure simply wasn’t in my vocabulary.

For example, I said I was going to dance on stage at a Bruce show. And I did.

It’s been humbling to have to change that without seeing it as failure. In my mind, Jacob was supposed to be the Galahad to my Lancelot (yes, I know only like three people got that. But I took an Arthurian legends class in college and it was cool. And I’m a nerd. Get over it). He was supposed to be perfect in all of the areas that I wasn’t. He would have no flaws. And while my mother will tell you he’s the most perfect baby ever, I’m still freaking out that he isn’t crawling yet. And still blaming myself, because if I’d caught the torticollis earlier, wouldn’t he be?

Back to everything being my fault.

But I’m learning. If eventual baby number two* isn’t gaining weight with breastfeeding alone, I’m not going to stress about supplementation because I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t control that. And that, as much as it felt like it was the first time around, it’s neither the end of the world, nor my fault.

*I am not pregnant. I am not planning on becoming pregnant any time soon. I have a nine month old. I’m tired. I do want a second child in the future, but if you read into this to assume that that’s coming soon, I may slap you.

I definitely know more now about keeping baby number two’s head round as well. I know the signs of torticollis, but the reality is that that may be unavoidable too. I had low amniotic fluid the first time around, which is again out of my control. But an earlier diagnosis, if that is an issue again, could be key in the flat head battle. I know to reposition, I know more about tummy time, I know to wear the baby more.

I also know that if future baby number two needs a helmet, we’ll do it. And I’ll do my best not to beat myself up about it too much.

Which may sound strange if you know me in person, because I’m also a mess. My desk at school is currently a raging dumpster fire of papers, my car looks like I live in it, and let’s not even get started on my closet. But I’m an organized mess. I know where everything is at all times and I don’t let my mess get in the way of my quest for perfection.

I’m also insanely competitive, which, if you’ve spoken to me for even three seconds, you already know. I’ve joked before that that’s why I like eBay–not only do you get to shop, it tells you you win when you buy something. And I love winning.

Combining being a perfectionist with my competitive nature, however, has been a disaster in motherhood, especially once we hit the torticollis and helmet bumps in the road. Because that helmet feels like a giant neon sign saying that my baby isn’t perfect, and as he is an extension of me, it feels like it’s screaming to the whole world about one of my flaws.

Yes, I know I’m ridiculous. But it’s still how it feels.

And it all ties in to the latest feeling of failure, which I’m calling FOLM–Fear of Late Milestones.

Much like FOMO or Fear of Missing Out, FOLM has always existed, but is exacerbated by the social media era. I’m sure that moms hundreds of years ago worried when they went to the park, or factory, or public execution (hey, hundreds of years ago, people had pretty sick forms of entertainment) and saw that other babies who were the same age as their babies were walking already and freaked out that there was something wrong with their baby. But it’s worse now that it’s all broadcast on social media.

Last weekend, I saw videos from two different friends, whose babies are within a couple of weeks of Jacob’s age, and their babies were crawling all over the place.

Jacob is not crawling. Nor does he seem anywhere close to it.

I cried. I Googled. I cried some more.

The reality is that babies are expected to start crawling between six and ten months, and Jacob is eight months old. So it doesn’t mean he’s behind. According to our physical therapist, part of that is disposition; Jacob is the most chill baby ever (which he certainly did not get from me, the anxiety queen), so he’s content to sit and watch the world. He’s also huge, weighing in at over 21 pounds at eight months, and bigger babies tend to reach some of the gross motor skills milestones later, as they have more weight to lug around with them.

He also seems to have no desire to crawl yet, which may be my fault. He’ll reach his hand out for something (which really looks like he’s using the Force. Mama’s inner Star Wars nerd is so proud of her little Jedi!), and one of us usually gives it to him. Who needs to crawl when you have a mommy slave?

But I crawled at six months, walked at nine months, identified letters on the fridge at 18 months, and wrote my first novel at 22 months.

Okay, that last one was more like at 25 years. But still. I was exceptionally precocious with all developmental milestones.

And Jacob was supposed to be even better than me with all of that.

I’m fully aware that my competitive nature has not won me any friends. In fact, it’s cost me a lot. Because not only do I try to be the best at everything, I succeed just enough to be insanely annoying. My mom was only in labor with me for eight hours (which is considered supersonic speed for a first baby). I told her I’d beat that, and I did, giving birth to Jacob six hours and one minute after my water broke. She lost eight pounds off her pre-pregnancy weight with me. I lost nine after Jacob was born. Etc.

Do you hate me yet? I kinda hate myself reading that. (And I bet I hate me more than you hate me! Okay, okay, I’ll stop…)

So watching Jacob not be the first to do everything is difficult, because there’s nothing that I can do (besides continuing his physical therapy and doing as many of his exercises with him as I can) to catch him up.

And even more upsetting, our physical therapist showed us a scale of things he should be able to do, and he’s definitely behind in a few areas. Even though the tilt from the torticollis is gone now, he still has residual shoulder strength issues. She said it’s really the chicken or the egg here–did his weak shoulder strength cause the torticollis, or did torticollis cause shoulder weakness.

She did assure us that there was nothing we could have done to prevent it either way, but I still feel like it’s my fault. Torticollis CAN be caused by low amniotic fluid, which I had. Yes, I know that wasn’t my fault on the logical level, but if it’s possible that my body did this to Jacob, I still feel like I did this.

On the plus side, our physical therapist assured us that he’s making progress, that we’ll keep working, that we’ll get him to where he needs to be, and that the age that babies walk and crawl at has no correlation whatsoever to the age that they hit any other developmental milestones at.

She also recommended I get serious professional help because I’m actually competing with myself for what age Jacob does things at.

Not really.

But that’s another one of those hard first-time parenting things, because what my brother and I did is my only real basis of comparison for what Jacob should be doing. And I hate worrying that he’s not exactly where a chart says that he should be.

Until then, feel free to keep reminding me that just because he’s not the first one to do something doesn’t mean he’s actually late. It does take both early and later babies to make up those average age ranges after all.

I know I’m jumping around a bit with this post, but it’s what’s happening now, and finding other blogs on this topic helped me. So if I can pay some of that forward, it’s worth sharing.

Jacob’s pediatrician pointed out that he had developed a flat spot on the back right side of his head at his four-month checkup. Hubby and I then descended into a shame spiral of shock and embarrassment that we missed it, panic that it was there in the first place, fear that we caused it, etc. Seriously. We turned into the seven dwarfs of parenting guilt.

“Just try to keep him off of it for a couple of months,” the pediatrician advised. “You can keep a wedge under that side of his mattress so it’s easier for him to turn his head the other way, and do a lot more tummy time. If that doesn’t fix it, you can always get a helmet.”

Sara the Hysterical Google Queen took over.

So I learned ALLLLLLL about plagiocephaly (flat head on one side), brachycephaly (flat back of the head, which I didn’t think was a concern, based on the pictures I found online and then compared frantically to Jacob’s head), and every other kind of cephaly there is (I was already a microcephaly expert from the single, non-Zika-infected mosquito bite I got while pregnant. Have I mentioned that I’m a hypochondriac?).

What did I learn? That repositioning could help and that this probably happened because he was such a great sleeper–which he did NOT inherit from me, the worst insomniac in the world. So because my perfect baby started sleeping through the night at two months old (don’t hate me), his little head grew crooked.

And a lot of nasty people on the internet said it only happens to parents who didn’t hold their babies enough. Guess what? I hold my baby all the freaking time. And this still happened.

But I’m Super Mom! I could fix this! I can fix anything if I try hard enough!

I repositioned like it was my job. For two months I barely slept, but not because Jacob, the most perfect baby in the world, was waking me up. No. I barely slept because I woke up every three minutes to make sure he wasn’t sleeping on his flat spot. I became an expert at flipping him over without waking him up. I joked I was going to patent a baby spatula for perfectly turned babies.

I bought seven, count them, SEVEN different types of flat head pillows, ranging from $15 to $110 each (I only bought one of the expensive ones). I sent him to daycare with one. I put one in his stroller. I put one on his changing table. I put one on his floor gym. But I only let him sleep on them for supervised naps while I stared at him the entire time to make sure he wouldn’t magically flip onto his belly (which he wasn’t doing yet) and suffocate.

I studied that head from every angle, trying to convince myself that I was seeing improvement. I wasn’t, but it also wasn’t getting worse. I will say that. The pillows do prevent it from getting worse.

And I kept Googling. But as we got closer to his six-month checkup and his flat spot hadn’t improved, I started worrying more. My baby was going to need a helmet. I could feel it.

One day, I took him for a long walk when his dad went out of town, and I took some pictures because he was so cute. And when I looked at the pictures, one eye looked bigger than the other. Cue the panic. I had read, in my frantic Googling, that plagiocephaly could cause facial asymmetry. (Note: we later learned he has no facial asymmetry. Literally, they measured digitally and there’s none at all. I am a crazy person. But in this case, the craziness was a good thing.)

Once I Googled the facial asymmetry with plagiocephaly though, I started finding another word a lot, which I had mostly ignored because I didn’t think it was an issue: torticollis.

Symptoms: head tilted in one direction with chin pointed toward another. Often causes difficulty breastfeeding on one side and difficulty looking in the direction of the head tilt. Rolling to one side only. A flat spot.

It was like one of those scenes in a movie where the protagonist figures out who the killer is. He hated breastfeeding on the right side, where he’d have to turn his head to the left. He only rolled to one side. And as I began scrolling through pictures in my phone, he was facing the same way in every one. Jacob had torticollis.

We took him to the pediatrician immediately, who wasn’t nearly as convinced as I was, but she did say it was time to visit the helmet place for an evaluation.

She wanted us to wait to see what the helmet people said about starting physical therapy, which I wasn’t comfortable with. Knowing that I’m my baby’s best advocate, I reached out to my network of moms and got a recommendation from a family friend to a WONDERFUL physical therapist who deals in infant torticollis.

Long story short, I think our pediatrician should have caught the torticollis (or at least mentioned it to us when she noticed the flat spot, because had I looked for that in pictures sooner, I would have spotted it. And I think dealing with the torticollis at four months would have helped the flat spot enough to potentially avoid the helmet), but it’s too late for that now.

I’ll do another post about the helmet situation (we’re in it now. It sucks, but we’ll deal), but trust your gut, mamas! If you think something is wrong, say something to your pediatrician. And if they won’t hear you out, go to a specialist. Jacob is doing AMAZING in physical therapy. The torticollis is now gone, we’re just working on some residual muscle strength issues in his shoulder, and in another few weeks, all of that should be absolutely perfect.

And if you want to learn from my experience, make sure you’re changing the direction that your baby sleeps in frequently starting at birth and doing lots of tummy time even if your baby hates it (and they ALL hate it!). And if you have to get a helmet, I promise, it’s not the end of the world.